Information

Platform
Max Players	12
Developer	Firaxis Games
Publisher	2K Games
Release	Sep 21, 2010
Genres	Turn-Based Strategy, 4X

Ratings

Features

	Online Multiplayer

On Steam

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Sid Meier's Civilization V

Sid Meier's Civilization V, or Civ 5, is a turn-based strategy game. Some people say it is simplified compared to its predecessors. Either way, if you like turn-based strategies, Civilization V should satisfy you. While it doesn't have a "cooperative" mode or even a campaign in the first place, you can still team up with your friends and play a game against AIs. All players take their turns at the same time, so you don't have to wait a long time for other players to make their moves. If you're all on the same team, you can observe and communicate with each other, making the time go by faster if one player needs to take a longer turn.

There are many different civilizations to choose from, and each has its unique benefits. Some are negligible, but others totally change the way you play the game, giving it a lot of replay value. On the negative side, the AI isn't very smart. The only way it will pose a challenge is on higher difficulty levels, where it simply cheats massively. You could also consider putting AI players on teams together in various combinations for an added challenge.

You can play with 12 people in a multiplayer game, however, if you do, there won't be any room left for AI. At that point, you're no longer playing co-op. In light of that, you probably shouldn't play with more than six people if you want any possibility of a challenge.

The game has a number of expansions and DLCs. All of the expansions are worth buying, because they each improve the game greatly by adding nice features. The DLCs mostly just add new civilizations and wonders. The most notable of which is the Korean civilization, which is the most ridiculously overpowered civilization in the game. It's hard to imagine what they were thinking when they created it, other than "let's make a DLC with an overpowered civ in order to tempt people to buy it".

While the game is mostly great, there are a number of things which annoyed us while playing it. These mostly factor into the implementation score, but I will list some of them here for your information.

• Multiplayer quick combat/movement. You don't have a choice but to enable these options, because the way they implemented them is very annoying. If quick combat is not enabled, you are forced to watch every single combat that any player gets into. This interrupts anything you might be trying to do at that moment, and pretty much makes the game unplayable. They really could have done better than that. Without quick movement, AI turns take forever, especially if their towns are revealed, because it forces you to wait through their slow unit movement.
• The game dragging your screen wherever it thinks you should be looking. This is most noticeable when you are choosing production for a town, but then try to look at something else. Until you close the production window, the game will constantly drag you back to that town.
• When a great person spawns, clicking on his icon doesn't select him, even though it pans over to him. Every other time you click on an icon, it pans you over to the unit/city and selects it. The fact that it doesn't for great people is annoying and often results in misclicks, which of course cannot be undone.
• The AI can make illegal moves. One example is when they capture a worker. Players cannot interact with workers that they capture until the following turn. However, AIs can interact with them immediately, which often results in the worker being deleted, which is extremely annoying.
• When you save the game, the next time you load will be the beginning of that turn. Furthermore, all AI moves will be reset to the previous turn. This effectively means that every time you save and reload, you get an extra turn over the AIs. While you can use this to your advantage and amusement if you want, it's still a bug that could be annoying for someone wanting to play fairly.

Brave New World

Brave New World is the latest expansion for Civilization V. While it does add a lot more intricacy to the game and attempts to make science less overpowered, it has a lot of problems so far. Most prominently, cooperative multiplayer games are almost unplayable. If you have three humans and nine AIs, the AI turns will take literally minutes to process, while you just sit there staring at the loading icon. It isn't as bad early on, but it gradually gets long and longer until the game is no longer worth playing. If this isn't fixed, then multiplayer games will have to limit the AI to only a few AI players in order to be playable. Furthermore, they also messed up the turn structures really badly. Barbarians now take their turn after your turn starts. All of the notifications will appear at the start of your turn, and then the barbarians will make their move, invalidating all of the barbarian-related notifications. So, while the gameplay technically gets better with Brave New World, the horrible optimization that already plagued the game gets even worse.